[sword-devel] Wiki front end comparison - a intermediate summary

[Peter von Kaehne]

I have worked now several hours on the wiki comparison page.

What I tried to achieve is reduction of as many as possible entries into
simple yes/no entries (+/- short comment) to make it as easy as possible
to actually compare.

This meant obviously that the number of list columns has gone  up
drastically to allow for all features, including the subfeatures of
features.

In particular I have tried to dissolve the unclassified "other" category
as much as possible.

I have therefore grouped the features into categories. These are
hopefully self explanatory and widely acceptable.

I have taken no account of smoothness of operations, ease of finding of
features, general beauty etc.

What becomes obvious is

a) BibleCS remains in the very top of our applications - only Xiphos and
 presumably (because I have not tested it) BT have the same wealth of
features and some more. All others are far behind in at least one major
category, often in several.

b) The most glaring lack of too many applications in my opinion is
incomplete module support. Please do not take deficiences in this area
as feature request but as a (show stopping?) bug.

c) A lot of the features presented as new in newer applications have
been present similar but under a different name in older.

d) Bookmarks/tags/lists - all these appear essentially similar as a
concept, but with some drastic differences in terms of access, usability
and sub features. No application has a complete superset of all others
in terms of subfeatures in this field. As a concept, bookmarks appear to
me a version of lexicon (or possibly a structured GenBook)_- at least
this is how many frontends have gone (some like BibleSword even bring a
lexicon like preloaded bookmark list)- but none actually have gone the
whole hog and have created a user editable LexDict module with their
book marks. Take this as a hint :-)

I am very sure that I am biased. I have shot some emails to some of you
if I could not find some features. Correct me if I got things wrong.

Peter